WASHINGTON, October 5, 2017 — American freedom comes at a price. That price was paid last weekend in Las Vegas when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers, killing 59 and wounding more than 500.

In societies that deny their citizens the natural right to bear arms, mass shootings are the exclusive province of governments.

And they are far more prolific killers than Vegas high-rollers who have gone off their rockers.

According to “The Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression”:

The People’s Republic of China killed 65 million.

The Soviet Union killed 20 million.

Cambodia killed 2 million.

North Korea killed 2 million.

“Perhaps a moral, rather than a social, approach to the Communist phenomenon can yield a truer understanding – for the much-investigated Soviet social process claimed victims on a scale that has never aroused a scholarly curiosity at all proportionate to the magnitude of the disaster,” wrote American historian Martin Malia in the forward to the English language version of the French book.

“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in a letter to friend and fellow Founding Father (not to mention Father of the U.S. Constitution) James Madison.

The issue of American independence came to a head when 700 British regulars under the command of Colonel Francis Smith marched on Concord, Massachusetts, to seize the arms, gunpowder and lead shot stored at the local militia’s magazine.

But things didn’t quite go as the British government had hoped, as recalled by British Brigadier General Hugh Percy:

“During the whole affair, the Rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with perseverance and resolution.”

“Government,” argued George Washington, “is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force.”

The American farmers that fired on Gen. Percy’s British regulars used armed force in eloquent response to King George’s unreasonable demand for a government monopoly on force.

“It is forbidden to kill,” said French author and thinker Voltaire, “therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

Ironically, gun-control advocates now demand our government impose an unconstitutional and unilateral government monopoly on force based on the act of a man as mad as mad King George.

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